Police better off using private video cameras

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, September 29, 2009

New Police Chief George Gascón wants to have crime cameras monitored in real time.

Expect howls of protest from paranoids worrying about privacy, complaints about cost, and a lack of support from the Board of Supervisors and even Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Instead, the chief should make an end run and use private cameras. When there's a violent crime in the Tenderloin, police Captain Gary Jimenez says his officers go straight to the local merchants with mounted video cameras.

"Quite honestly, we get the video sooner and the quality is much better," Jimenez said.

Jimenez says about nine months ago, a gunman opened fire on Turk Street, firing into a crowd and winging a bystander. When officers arrived, they got no cooperation from witnesses, including the victim.

"But we didn't need them," he said. "We got all of it on tape. And we had it instantly."

Larry Moore, the dapper, homeless shoe-shine man, has had quite a run since he was featured in this column in June. Readers helped Moore pay for his street permit, and he has lived in a hotel for four months.

He's also got a sidewalk sign advertising his business, created by students of Jim Canning, a digital arts instructor at the Academy of Art. In addition, Moore's story appeared in the National Enquirer, and there were recent feelers from a national cable television network about a documentary.

"I've still got the best office in the city," Moore says, popping the shine rag on dress shoes.

Reader Joe Heavey was thrilled when his favorite north-south corridor, Seventh Street, was recently repaved. But last week Heavey was distressed to see a city worker marking the street for excavation.

"Why are they allowed to dig into a brand new pave job?" Heavey asked. "Seventh Street will probably not be repaved in my lifetime."

You're getting a little melodramatic there, Joe. Although work began Monday on a PG&E project that will tear up the street, Christine Falvey of the Department of Public Works says once it is done, the entire intersection will be repaved.